Fat Dad: A Vegetarian Rosh Hashana

When I was 11 years old, my father spent six months at a Durham, N.C., fat farm, where he lived on the rice diet in order to shed an extreme amount of weight.

His bosses at McCann Erickson advertising, where he was a creative director working with the agency’s top clients including Coke, Nestle and Kentucky Fried Chicken, thought it was imperative that he lose weight. He consented and successfully lost half his weight during his stay, leaving home at 350 pounds and returning at 175 pounds.

It was August 1974, just a few weeks before the Jewish New Year — the time of rebirth and a feast of traditional sweet, salty and savory foods. To celebrate his victory, my mom, who hated to cook, but loved large gatherings, “a real Auntie Mame,” my dad would brag, orchestrated a huge potluck party to celebrate his new svelte figure. As my mother sang the theme song to “Miss America” in her loud bravado voice, my dad walked down the stairs giving little Rockette kicks, while tossing his old pants, which could now fit three of him, into the howling crowd.

“Wow, who knew you could look this great from eating white rice and chicken?” one guest shouted.

My dad took a bow. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is what months of starving, three packs of Camels unfiltered a day, and bowls of white rice with dry chicken rubbed with mineral oil will get you,’’ he said. “Autographs are accepted, but please, no rice this evening.”

“Lucky he lost his weight, not his sense of humor!” another guest bellowed.

As everyone listened to my dad’s stories of how he went from 8,000 calories a day to 800 calories a day, my cousin Linda, who had just arrived from Los Angeles, introduced me to her new boyfriend, Mulligan.

Linda knew I had won an award for best baker in the sixth grade, and she wanted me to taste an apple pie Mulligan had baked for the party. Mulligan, with his long, thin frame and tie-dye T-shirt, handed me a bite of vegan apple pie that he had somehow created without using butter, milk or eggs.

“Let each ingredient dance on your tongue,” he told me. “Do not swallow until you have really tasted it. I usually chew 100 times before swallowing – both for digestion and to honor the food. Pretty tasty, huh?”

The apples tasted so fresh, not syrupy or sweet. And the crust was nutty and firm. I drilled Mulligan about the ingredients of the pie and what it meant to be a vegetarian. I thought Mulligan, who had a metal plate in his head and told stories about surviving Vietnam, was the most interesting person I had ever met.

After that night I called my grandmother, Beauty — the best cook I knew, the one who taught me to core apples and season a stew, the one who sent me a recipe card every week after my family moved from our hometown of Chicago to Manhattan. Beauty was a fan of vegetables anyway, so she suggested that I research the vegetarian diet, even though it was so different from the way she cooked. I was hoping if I learned more about vegetarianism, I could inspire my dad to take care of his body the way Mulligan inspired me with mantras like “Respect your body, and it will respect you,” and “Eat live food from the ground, bursting with life.”

I used my subway pass to explore the different health food stores around the city — learning about new ingredients that I never knew existed. I learned that tempeh and seitan were lower-calorie substitutes for meat, and that you could puree tofu and use it as a cheese substitute.

Two weeks after my father’s homecoming, I cooked the family Rosh Hashana dinner. It seemed like a traditional holiday meal with brisket, kugel and apple pie. But this year I had made vegetarian versions of these classic recipes. I thought that after mostly rice for months and no vegetables, my dad might die if he did not eat something healthy.

My father ate every bite of the meatless brisket, which he said tasted like “sweet cardboard,” making it an improvement over the food he had in North Carolina. In a Bob Barker-game-show-host kind of voice, he said the dairy-free kugel and the vegan apple pie were “five star.”

After dinner he went out for his nightly exercise walk, using the pedometer he had brought home with him from the fat farm. It was hours before he returned. When he came back from his “power” walk, his mouth was greasy, and he smelled of brisket.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “It was just not like mother’s.” Sadly, that sentiment about my fake brisket eventually became the inspiration for a new kosher dog food campaign he was working on. “Bubbe Goldberg’s, the One That Tastes Like Mother’s.”

Despite that early setback, my efforts to convert my father to a vegetarian lifestyle eventually succeeded years later. And for the record, the vegan pie and kugel were gone by the morning, and they became a requested staple at many more holiday dinners.